Archives for November 2018

Day by day it’s becoming more evident that things are not going well within the Congress party after joining hands with the JD(s) to form a coalition government.

On Thursday, November 29 a large delegation of Congress party workers of Hassan district met former Chief Minister and Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Siddaramaiah and complained that Public Works Minister H D Revanna is trying to weaken the Congress party in Hassan district. They also informed that the Congress facing a lot of problems by a regional party and the party is under threat due to this.

They further requested Siddaramaiah to come to Hassan and review the political situation there.

Revanna reacting to the allegations against him made by Congress party workers of Hassan said he has never tried to bring down any party and is ready to discuss this issue with Siddaramaiah.

He further said, “I don’t know why they’ve complained against me.”

Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president Dinesh Gundu Rao reacting to the issue said that it’s an internal party matter.

Putting an end to the speculations that he was in Mumbai for last two days Ramesh Jharakiholi clarified that he was in Bengaluru.

Addressing presspersons on Friday Ramesh said “Some political leaders are trying to dent my image by simply spreading rumours about me. I am in the city for the past two days and have not gone to Mumbai”

He further added that there was some misunderstanding within the party but now AICC President Rahul Gandhi has resolved it.

Supporting Ramesh Jharakiholi, water resources minister DK Shivakumar said that the media is simply spreading rumours about Ramesh.

“He is my personal friend, we have known each other for many years. I am very sure he will never cheat his party,” said Shivakumar.

Star wrestlers Bajrang Punia, Vinesh Phogat and Pooja Dhadha were among the 24 players to get the central contracts which came into effect from November 15, the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) announced on Friday.

The biggest beneficiaries are Bajrang, Vinesh and Pooja who have been put in the ‘A’ category. The others have been divided in four other categories (B to E).

The three marquee wrestlers will get an annual retainership of Rs 30 lakh, besides other benefits.

Rahul Aware, Naveen, Utkarsh Kale, Sachin Rathi, Vijay, Simran, Manshi and Anusha are in Category D and are entitled to Rs 5 lakh each annually, while Navjot Kaur, Kiran, Harpreet Singh and Jitendra will get Rs 3 lakh each, having been placed in Grade E.

The WFI, keeping the future in mind, will support 120 boys and girls, who have been placed in grades F, G, H and I where the U-23, Junior, Cadets and U-15 will reap the benefits of the development and growth programmes.

In Grade F, WFI has kept all Under-23 National-level gold medal winners across all categories and these wrestlers will get an annual stipend of Rs 1.2 lakh, each of them collecting Rs 10,000 per month.

In an inaugural ceremony of the Senior Nationals at Nandininagar in UP, where Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was the chief guest, WFI Chief Brij Bhushan Saran Singh announced the central contracts for the wrestlers.

“Wrestling can’t get better than this. The central contracts system is a big boon and will boost our morale,” said Bajrang.

Echoing his view, Vinesh said: “It (the money) will motivate us more than ever and it provides a good competition among wrestlers.”

“We are demanding legal rights for farmers – especially for tenant farmers and women farmers with no rights,” said Kavitha Kuruganti, with the advocacy group Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture.

“Our farmers need secure rights over land and better prices for their crop to be free from debt,” she told Reuters.

Against backdrop of suicides and debt, farmers demand action

Organisers said some 80,000 farmers and farm labourers were participating in the two-day agitation that will culminate with a petition to the Indian president.

“We have three main demands. Debt waiver, maximum price for the produce and a special parliament session to discuss the crisis,” Ajit Nawale from Maharastra Kisan Sabha, one of the 200 farmer groups organising the Delhi March, told AFP news agency.

More than 300,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the last two decades mainly because of poor irrigation, failed crops and being unable to pay back loans.

Each year millions of small farmers suffer due to scant irrigation facilities that reduces the yield and leads farmers into a deadly cycle of debt and suicides.

‘Long Live Farmer Unity’

Farmers from across the country have flooded by train and bus into New Delhi since Thursday to mass in the capital city’s Ramlila Grounds before marching to parliament.

Modi promised to double our income but we can’t even feed ourselves

LABO BANIGO, A FARMER FROM EASTERN ORRISA STATE

Some 50,000 marched in the eastern city of Kolkata on Wednesday.

Participants marched through central Delhi chanting slogans and holding placards emblazoned with “Down With Modi Government” and “Long Live Farmer Unity” as thousands of riot and armed policemen stood guard.

“The farmer crisis has got twice as bad in the last five years,” Sadhu Singh, a farmer from northern Punjab state known as India’s rice bowl, told AFP news agency.

“We are losing money on every grain of rice we produce,” he said.

Friday’s demonstration was the latest of several protests this year.

In March, thousands of women farmers marched into Mumbai alongside their male peers in March, demanding recognition of their rights over forest and farm land.

Campaigners said implementation of the landmark 2006 Forest Rights Act (FRA), which was meant to benefit a fifth of India’s population, has been hobbled by conflicting legislation and a lack of political will.

At the same time, states have diluted several protective clauses of the Land Acquisition Act of 2013 to speed up purchases for industry and infrastructure.

Since the laws are not effectively applied, farmers need “stronger rights to their land”, said Namita Wahi, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in New Delhi.

“(Farmers need) not only a title, but also use, possession, occupancy and livelihood rights,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The rights of farmers and indigenous people

The rights of farmers and indigenous people have grabbed an unlikely spotlight in elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states.

Why are Indian farmers protesting?

Analysts say their discontent could hurt Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist party in the upcoming state elections.

The government points to initiatives such as improved irrigation, crop insurance and electronic trading platforms as evidence it has helped rural Indians, who make up about 70 percent of the 1.3 billion population.

The right-wing prime minister has promised to double their income by 2022 but farmers say nothing has changed for them.

Labo Banigo from eastern Orrisa state said he is under huge debts after his crops failed due to back-to-back bad monsoons.

We have three main demands. Debt waiver, maximum price for the produce and a special parliament session to discuss the crisis

“Modi promised to double our income but we can’t even feed ourselves.”

Nearly 55 percent of Indians are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. The sector accounts for nearly 15 percent of India’s economic output.

A ‘long march’ by India’s farmers forces government to act

Economist Niranjan Rajadhyaksha called for the right to property to be reinstated in the constitution.

India’s constitution of 1950 recognised the right to property as a fundamental right. But subsequent laws undermined that right, and it was scrapped in 1978.

No major political party has since made reinstatement of the right to property a campaign issue, lest they be seen as pandering to the rich, Rajadhyaksha wrote in Mint, a daily newspaper.

“Property rights are a tool of inclusion rather than exclusion,” he wrote.

“The poor have neither the legal resources nor the political heft to fight laws or administrative orders that allow the takeover of their land, (and) not enough opportunities to make a living in case they are forcibly separated from their property.”

Police had initially thought that the woman had killer her son first and then taken her own life.

Ten days after police in Karnataka started investigating the suspected suicide of 26-year-old IT firm executive Shravani TP and her two-year-old son Sai Manas, they have now concluded it to be a murder case. Police had initially thought that the 26-year-old had killed her son first and took her own life in their Vijayapura residence in Devanahalli (near Bengaluru airport). Even Shivani’s parents and husband did not suspect it to be a case of murder, police said as a bottle of poison was found beside the body.

On Thursday, police said they have arrested Hemanth Kumar M, who worked for an internet service provider, for allegedly strangling the mother and son. Hemanth who was in a relationship with Shivani allegedly committed the crime after she refused to leave her husband. Police have now found that on the day of murder, Shivani was on leave and her husband Rajesh S was working as usual in a school in Chikkaballapur.

The police began probing other angles as a towel was found beside the bodies. Traces of poison were also found in Shivani’s hands and face and there was no suicide note either. The suspicion of Doddaballapura Deputy Superintendent R Mohan Kumar and Vijayapura Circle Inspector DR Prakash who were leading the probe was confirmed by the autopsy report.

“But the crime scene suggested foul play, as there were strangulation marks on Shravani’s neck, and the towel used to strangle her was also found around her neck,” police officials told media.

Based on phone call records, police found Hemanth was in contact with Shivani regularly and he was called for questioning when he confessed to the crime. According to police, Hemanth went to Shivani’s residence with a bottle of poison and asked her to kill herself with him. He killed her when she refused to do so by strangling her with the towel. He killed Manas too, fearing he could be a witness to the crime.

As part of their preparations for the Olympic Qualifiers, Hockey India has invited former Australian striker Glenn Turner to work with the womens hockey team strikers in a special camp starting December 1 at the Sports Authority of India (SAI), Bengaluru, it was announced on Friday.

The Canberra Hockey star who was part of the World Cup-winning Australian squad in 2010 and 2014, will arrive in Bengaluru on Friday night for the eight-day national camp.

Speaking about the camp, coach Sjoerd Marijne said: “It is good for our strikers to use the experience of Glenn Turner. As a striker, his positioning in the circle was critical for his team scoring goals and the positioning of strikers is one of the key areas we want to improve on.”

Marijne further emphasised that the camp will also help build leadership among the players.

“Glenn is someone who has experienced the pressure of performing top level hockey and he was part of the Australia’s leadership group and often worked with younger players in his team. We will ask him to share his experience as a leader too and I am sure our strikers can benefit immensely from this camp,” added Marijne.

Amid demands of his resignation, ailing Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar is expected to meet the ruling BJP legislators at his private residence on Saturday, party sources said on Friday.

“The Chief Minister will be meeting our party MLAs at his residence. He is expected to review works related to MLAs in the presence of key officials of the state administration,” a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) source said.

The former Defence Minister is being treated at his residence for advanced pancreatic cancer.

Parrikar has been in and out of hospitals in Goa, Mumbai, New York and New Delhi for nearly nine months.

He returned from Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on October 14 and has not moved out of his private residence, for any official event since.

The Opposition, as well ruling coalition allies have been demanding the resignation of the Chief Minister, claiming that the administration has come to a standstill due to Parrikar’s absence.

On Thursday, Revenue Minister Rohan Khaunte said that he had stopped visiting his office at the state Secretariat, claiming files were not being cleared by officials in the Chief Minister’s absence.

In the first week of December, the Congress is scheduled to start a state-wide agitation demanding the replacement of Parrikar as Chief Minister, because of his inability to attend office due to his prolonged illness.

Growing warnings by scientists of an impending high-magnitude earthquake in the Himalayas have got further credence from yet another study by Indian researchers.

The new study, led by seismologist C.P. Rajendran of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, says the “enormous stacking up of strain in the region portends at least one earthquake of magnitude 8.5 or more in one of the overlapping segments of the central Himalayas anytime in the future”.

According to the study, published in “Geological Journal”, the researchers critically evaluated existing databases along with the data from two newly explored locales — Mohana Khola in far western Nepal and Chorgalia, which falls within the Indian border, to determine the timing of the last faulting event on the frontal thrust of the central Himalayas.

The researchers followed the local geology and structural map published by the Geological Survey of India, besides using Google Earth and imagery from Indian space agency ISRO’s Cartosat-1 satellite.

The analysis, the researchers say, “compels us to conclude that a great earthquake of magnitude 8.5 or more that occurred between 1315 and 1440 had unzipped a stretch of about 600 km (the length of central seismic gap from Bhatpur to beyond Mohana Khola) in the central Himalayas with an average slip (or displacement) of 15 metres”.

The present study underlines the fact after this massive earthquake, the frontal thrust in the central Himalayas (covering parts of India and eastern Nepal) has remained seismically quiet for 600 to 700 years, implying enormous build-up of strain in the region.

“An earthquake of magnitude 8.5 or more is overdue in this part of the Himalayas, given the long-elapsed time.

“Considering this potentially high seismic risk, this will be particularly catastrophic for a region marked by an ever-growing population and unhindered expansion of the built-up environment, to be contrasted with poor preparedness to meet this contingency,” Rajendran told this correspondent.

Roger Bilham, a US geophysicist at the University of Colorado whose years of work laid the basis for the current knowledge about earthquakes in the Himalayan region, fully supports the Indian researchers’ findings.

“They are undeniably correct in concluding that should an earthquake occur now, its magnitude could equal 8.5,” Bilham told this correspondent in an email.

“My own evaluation of the available evidence suggests their estimate is conservative, and should the rupture zone extend from east of Almora to west of Pockara (Nepal) the earthquake will exceed 8.7,” he added

The findings by Rajendran and his team confirm two other studies by Indian geophysicists — one led by K.M. Sreejith at the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad, and another led by Vineet Gahalaut, director of the National Centre for Seismology in New Delhi.

Analysing data from a network of 36 Global positioning System (GPS) stations and using a geodetic method called InSAR (Interferometric synthetic aperture radar) Sreejit and his team reported (in the journal Scientific Reports) that an earthquake of a magnitude similar to or greater than that of 2015 Gorkha earthquake (7.8) is due in the central Himalayas.

Gahalaut and his team, who analysed the continuous GPS measurements of crustal deformation from 28 sites reported (in Earth & Planetary Science Letters) that the next major earthquake is likely to occur in the Garhwal-Kumaun segment of the northwest Himalayas.

Arun Bapat, a Pune-based research seismologist who correctly predicted the December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami, told this correspondent: “The predicted large magnitude earthquake in the Himalayas could occur most probably in 2018 or its proximity.”

Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy has requested his Goa counterpart Manohar Parrikar to lift the blanket ban on fish import, claiming that the crackdown has caused “huge losses” to the fishermen from the southern state.

In a letter, Kumaraswamy said: “I request you to kindly permit transportation and trading activities of fish between the two states and the ban order issued by the state of Goa may be kept on hold till we comply with FDA regulation.

“It is requested that this blanket ban may be withdrawn… Karnataka will ensure that the fish traders comply with the FDA regulations and obtain a certificate after meeting the required standards.”

The letter, which was received by Parrikar’s office on Thursday, also said fisherfolk from three coastal districts in Karnataka — Uttara Kannada, Dakshina Kannada, Udupi — who harvest a catch of nearly 4.10 lakh tonne every year, were now facing huge losses on account of the ban.

“The fishermen have been taken by surprise by the sudden ban on fish trade to the state of Goa. This has resulted in huge losses by the coastal fishermen and lot of unrest among the fishermen community.”

The controversy involving use of formalin in fish erupted in July after a Food and Drugs Administration team found traces of the carcinogenic cadaver preservative in fish sold in Goa.

The BJP-led coalition government has been on the back-foot ever since, after several of its ministers were accused of allegedly protecting fish traders who were reportedly importing formalin-laced fish consignments into Goa from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Under public pressure to crackdown on the “fish mafia”, Goa on November 12 banned the import of fish from traders who were unregistered with the state’s FDA.